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Comment by mattgreenrocks | Hacker News Reader

Another failing in consumer-grade routers.

It's depressing how bad many consumer-targeted products there are in the tech space. Printers (seriously, why do we still have printer drivers), routers, operating systems, even software. Even non-techie users take notice of this!

Is there space for a competitively priced consumer router of high quality?

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I would definitely fund a kickstarter campaign for a fully open-source AC router designed for OpenWRT.

I would imagine that the OpenWRT community (and related open-source firmwares like Tomato and DD-WRT) are sufficiently large enough that there is a market for a piece of hardware that is optimal for open-source router firmware.

For quite a long time, there was a Linksys WRT model that remained in production long after its useful life (because it had old radio standards and was slow and because newer devices were much cheaper with greater capabilities) because it ran Linux, and could be hacked very easily and could use all Open Source drivers and such. It's even where "OpenWRT" got the WRT in its name.

So, there's definitely a market for it. But, I don't know that it's comparable to the market for consumer oriented devices. It'd be nice if consumers were smarter and knew enough to demand this kind of thing.

It'd be really nice if one could go to the store and buy a router running OpenWRT or Tomato or whatever, like you can go to the store and ask for an Android phone or a Windows PC. As operating systems go, many current routers are probably more complex than DOS or early Windows versions and certainly more complex than many early phone operating systems. Not sure why nobody has thought to make the OS a competitive factor for routers.

You're thinking of the WRT54G (earlier firmware versions only, as later versions used VxWorks which prevented third-party firmware from being used), and finally the WRT54GL that was created specifically for OpenWRT and such (they returned to a Linux based OS).

The WRT54G went through several generations, the later generations having different hardware and just sharing the model name. They weren't all compatible with the various xWRT's of the day.

I had a v1 WRT54G; after six or seven years running OpenWRT, it finally died last month. Now I have a cheap TPLink while I wait for the dust to settle on the AC models.

What's worse is that the older generations were not necessarily an improvement either (IIRC). I think the amount of persistent memory of the device in later generations was reduced to lower costs and that some later generation models don't have enough disk space for OpenWRT.

You're probably thinking of the WRT54G, they're actually releasing an update compatible with OpenWRT: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2429130,00.asp

Wow, sounds awesome. $300 though. :-(

Almond+ is probably worth looking at. It isn't fully open-source (AFAIK), but OpenWRT is used for the underpinnings, and is fully available.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2037429657/almond-80211...

The beta units are just now shipping, and I would expect full production to be underway within a few months.

Since the kickstarter is over, I signed up for pre-order notifications on their website[0]. Thanks.

[0] http://www.securifi.com/almondplus

TP-links have been long-standing favorites of hacker community. They might not be the highest specced and you need to be careful about which model you pick, but there are some good (value) devices there.

Of course assuming you are going to run OpenWRT or something equivalent. Running some OEM crap on routers is just madness.

Yes! TP-Link is awesome :D

TL-MR3020+OpenWRT = <333

Buffalo makes some great hardware with DD-WRT preinstalled at a reasonable price ($50-90 depending on what you want).

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